I Failed. AKA: Why This Blog Exists
Over the summer, I failed. Now, in general, I fail a lot. I fail at art, and school, and personal goals. I find it a point of pride to fail often and regularly. It means I can learn something. It means I was pushing myself. It means that I have something to do next. I usually have no problem with it.
But, as someone trying to develop a thesis around syntropy, having my backyard syntropic row fail just hit a little bit harder than a normal failure. I thought I would have to completely change my thesis, or develop a completely different plot outline. This backyard row, created with terrible gardening equipment, in-ground that had never been worked, by an extremely new gardener — I can see now that it was kind of doomed to fail. So, in honor of Friday the 13th, I will be taking you on the story of my failure. It just felt appropriate.
My failure, like many failures around the world today, started with a global pandemic sending me off my college campus and to my childhood home. This happened on March 11th, right after I submitted my thesis proposal to the school. The next few days were, as one may imagine, a bit hectic. I packed up my dorm room, said goodbye to friends, somehow found the time to go to class (who holds class the day after the world ends?), and mourned in confusing solidarity with others whose own plans had rapidly changed. In between all of this, I found the time to go to a small, out of the way 3x9 meter plot right on the line where fields change to the forest on the upper campus. Located behind the main practice fields, the plot was in reach of a hose (good), fairly close to the greenhouse (really good), and already had soil tests done on it regularly by the college (truly excellent). I had spent the last few weeks carefully and systematically making a plan for a syntropic row. Before March 11th, I was excited to plant. I had picked out native, pollinator plants to fit the environment and landscape of the land near the plot. The school already keeps beehives in the same location, so I pictured myself on a hazy spring morning, leisurely watering my blooming syntropic row as bees buzzed happily in the background. I cleared my plot with the head of groundskeeping and got money from the school fund to buy seeds of various kinds. I was planning to plant in early May and come back throughout the summer to monitor and water my row.
Nope.
Instead, less than a week after I finalized my plans, I was staring at the dead grass of my backyard. Well, I thought, I still need a plot for next year. I am in the same general region as the plot planned before. Could I plant it at my house? I decided to try. In mid-May, later than I had planned but still very much in the time scale to plant spring plants, I got to work. Instead of planting seedlings, as I had anticipated, the lack of greenhouse access now meant I had to direct seed all of my plants. Direct seeding is riskier than planting seedlings, so I knew I had to be careful. Ordinarily, I would have been able to perform a soil test, to test the levels of nutrients and better inform my plant choices. I was not able to do so. I had to assume that the soil, as other plants were growing in the same location, contained all the necessary nutrients for my row to grow.
Prepping the row was a special kind of fun. And by special kind of fun, I mean it wasn’t fun at all. It was quite horrible, actually. The ground I was planting had not been touched for over 20 years, and the best tool I had to break it up was a 15-year-old ice slammer we use to clear our brick steps in winter. I forged ahead, prepping the ground for planting and hauling up dead leaves and other debris from the forest to use as ground cover before my initial plants grew in. I planted the seeds carefully, following my initial plan. I gave the ground a good bit of water, and I waited. And I waited. And I waited. And nothing happened. Of all the seeds I planted, definitely 100+, maybe 5 or 6 struggling plants managed to break through the soil and reach the direct sunlight.
Two, three months pass. I began to think I may have to accept that my row was less of a row and more of a patch of dirt covered in leaves that ferns were slowly starting to take over. I can’t say why exactly it failed. I have some guesses, ranging from the fact that my house is in a valley and as a result receives very limited sunlight, to the intense cold snap that randomly occurred within 72 hours of planting my seeds. If I had to put money on it (and thank god I don’t) I would guess the cold snap. To be honest, though, it didn’t matter to me at the moment why the row had failed. I just knew that it did. And because I have seen thriving syntropic farms, I knew that the problem wasn’t the concept of syntropy — it was me. Something I had done had messed it up. Planted too early, wasn’t prepared with enough equipment like warming tarps and drip tape, watering too much, watering too little…the litany of mistakes I could have or do make is endless. Normally, when I fail, I can foresee some chance in the future to succeed in the same field. In the haze of quarantine and listless summer months, I couldn’t see a second chance to succeed at this.
Despite having worked on a couple of farms, I am not a farmer by trade. I’m not a fan of weeding, trellising makes me nervous, and if I ever have to mulch a flower field ever again, I’m going to drown myself. Given this, I don’t really know why I expected my plot to succeed. Green thumb, I am not. I fully accepted my failure, and reached out to my advisor, and explained the situation. After approval from the head of the Honors Department, I began to work on a new format for the thesis project, one that definitely couldn’t freeze and die in the cold ground.
After developing my new thesis plan, I felt rejuvenated. I wanted to figure out why exactly my row failed. I went to the root of all agricultural problems: the soil. Using federally produced data and soil information from a 2006 survey, I looked up the specific soil attributes of my backyard. Instead of what I was hoping for, which was that nothing could ever grow there ever and I was a fool for even trying, I found that my house was sitting on soil designated as “Farmland of local importance”.[1] In Merrimack County in New Hampshire, where my house is located, this means that it is not excessively sloped, rocky, or wet, and has less than 40% shallow soil.[2] Basically, it’s not impossible to grow things, as it would be in a marsh for instance, but it is not especially easy to grow things there either. After learning this, I do feel a bit better about my failure of a row; at least I’m not in “prime farmland” aka “any idiot could grow almost anything here”. While looking this up, I also learned that the soil around my house consists of “Paxton fine sandy loam, 8 to 15 percent slopes, very stony”.[3] Huh. Well, the “very stony” part of this description is absolutely accurate and I can tell you that first hand. “Paxton fine sandy loam” is a soil designation for soils that are deep, well-drained, moderately permeable, and moderately to strongly acidic. Now, I initially planned this row behind my school, so I am largely not worried about the deepness or well-drained soil, as both of these soil characteristics can make it easier for plants to grow. I am slightly worried, however, about the acidity of the soil behind my house. That may have made a difference in how my plants were supposed to grow.
I designed the row using local MA plants that I knew grew in the area around my school. Could it be that the soil around my house was too different from the soil around my school? I didn’t think so, because they are in the same U.S. agricultural hardiness zone, but I wanted to check anyway. The soil around my school did end up looking different at first. In the area where I was to plant, the soil was not Paxton fine sandy loam soil, but a Charlton-Hollis-Rock outcrop complex, 3 to 8 percent slopes.[4] This means that there are two types of soil where I was going to plant initially, Charlton soils, and Hollis soils. The “complex” is how the soil is mixed together. I thought that I had a new clue as to why my row failed. The soil types I planted in were different from the soil types I planned to plant in — and I am not sophisticated enough to undertake soil engineering in my backyard. Not yet, anyway.
After looking into more, I discovered that both components of the soil, Charlton soil, and Hollis soil, actually also had pretty high acidity.[5] So, it probably wasn’t the soil acidity that made all my plants die. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t the soil though. Soil is highly specific, as I have briefly mentioned before, and the soil properties can change based on the types of plants within it. As I talked about in my blog post on stratification, the plants that I seeded should have developed a healthy relationship with the soil, so as long as the basic characteristics of the soil are compatible with the plants. Which they are. Given that, I am still a little bit confused as to why my row didn’t grow the way it should have. I’m back to my initial idea of the cold snap killing all of my seeds, and back to wishing, I had invested in some warming tarps. Oh well.
I didn’t get exactly what I wanted. I failed a major component of my thesis and had to regroup entirely. It hurt then, and quite frankly it still hurts a little bit now. I don’t know if I will ever succeed at growing a syntropic row of my own. But I know that when I failed, I got a whole lot of new ferns and a blog. And at least I don’t have to mulch anything over Thanksgiving Break.
With an acknowledgment that this doesn’t have much to do with syntropy,
Ajah
[1] Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) New Hampshire, United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). April 13th, 2006. Merrimack Belknap Soil Survey Update. Agricultural Evaluation Worksheet. https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_DOCUMENTS/nrcs144p2_015053.pdf. November 13th, 2020.
[2] Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) New Hampshire, United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). March 18th, 2013. Merrimack Belknap Soil Survey Update. Soil Data Directory. https://prod.nrcs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_DOCUMENTS/stelprdb1083451.pdf. November 13th, 2020.
[3] Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) New Hampshire, United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). April 13th, 2006. Merrimack Belknap Soil Survey Update. Agricultural Evaluation Worksheet. https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_DOCUMENTS/nrcs144p2_015053.pdf. November 13th, 2020.
[4] Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). July 31, 2019. Web Soil Survey. https://websoilsurvey.nrcs.usda.gov/app/WebSoilSurvey.aspx. November 13, 2020.
[5] Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). May 2016. Natural Cooperative Soil Survey. Charlton Series/Hollis Series. https://soilseries.sc.egov.usda.gov/OSD_Docs/C/CHARLTON.html. November 13, 2020.
